


Libyssa

by dirtybinary



Category: Ancient History RPF, Classical Greece and Rome History & Literature RPF, Punic Wars RPF
Genre: M/M, Not Really Character Death, Suicide mentions, partial Epistolary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-14 21:25:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13598706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: Living as an exile after Zama, Hannibal starts to receive parcels from Scipio.





	Libyssa

**Author's Note:**

> [There's now a playlist to go along with this fic!](https://open.spotify.com/user/valipoke/playlist/0l6PxcTg2H2iLIDsnTKPn7?si=kuPb2I35QRSUDBnn1QrYRA)

The ships come in across the Propontis, bearing news that Scipio Africanus is dead.

He is a has-lived, he has boarded Charon’s ferry, and the more world-wise members of King Prusias’ court remark that the exile from Carthage is taking it with very good grace indeed. He _has_ just outlived his nemesis of thirty years, and one could even argue he won out in the end—here he is in their own lovely Bithynia, after all, building cities and commanding fleets with the vigour of a man half his age, while that fellow Africanus died angry and forsaken. Surely anyone could be pardoned some gloating.

Instead, Hannibal’s reaction baffles his friends at court. He stops in his tracks and makes them repeat the story twice. Then, in an odd tight voice, he asks them questions that make no sense. What was it he died of? (Uncertain—some ignominious fever, to be sure.) Where is he buried? (Not in Rome; he was clear on that point.) Were there witnesses? (How should they know?) Having heard all this, he nods once, decisively, and walks off without another word.

Those Carthaginians are a strange lot, the courtiers say to one another. And this one is stranger than most. It’s the exile. It does that to a person.

 

* * *

 

Hannibal is a veteran of loss by now. He knows how it works. The news comes when you least expect it—by fire-signals, on a fast ship in the night, flung in a sack over the palisades of your camp—and either it is true or it is false, but you do not question it, you do not waste time. You lodge it like a guest in a comfortable, out-of-the-way place in your mind, and you go on, you go until you can go no farther, because you have to, because you swore.

So he resumes his daily business with the same relentless care he has applied to everything in his life. He inspects the royal army, which is pitiful, but better than it was before he came. He interviews some fisherfolk on the whereabouts of the Pergamene fleet, and hears with relish that the incident with the snakes scared them off well and good. He revises a chapter of his treatise on the Galatian war, and even finds it in himself to harangue King Prusias on some points of statecraft—a futile and thankless labour which he nonetheless feels compelled to undertake from time to time, like telling a bad joke over and over again.

Only late at night does he go to the ebony casket at the foot of his bed, and lift out the old manuscript within.

He has carried it with him for close to twenty years now, though the last chapter is of more recent provenance. The part he knows by heart goes like this:

_—and so it was that in my five-and-twentieth year, I took up command in the province of Spain. Though I had held no magistracy higher than the aedileship, it is not to be conjectured (as indeed many at the time did) that I was altogether naive in the ways of war. For I had been initiated in the arts of deception and ambuscade in my youth, and it had come at the hands of a master both brilliant and subtle. I speak of course of Hannibal son of Hamilcar surnamed Barca, the mothers’ warning, the nighttime fear, of whose like there will never be another._

He is lying. He knows it all by heart.

 

* * *

 

The first scroll arrives at planting season the year after Zama, when Hannibal has retired to his father’s lands at Hadrumetum to grow olives. His sister finds the parcel, and brandishes it at him. “What the hell is this? His idea of a joke?”

She visits him often. It is just the two of them now, like in those earliest years in Sicily: Arishat restless and quick-tongued, always in motion; Hannibal quieter, more watchful, seldom without Homer or Plato in hand. He wasn’t a hell-raiser till he had brothers to raise it with. “Is he mocking you?” says Arishat, outraged. “I thought he quite liked you.”

Hannibal laughs. He laughs a lot more these days than he ever did during the war. “Oh, he did.”

With the air of one picking up a dead rat, Arishat skims the first few lines of the memoir. She paces, and mutters aloud, and makes faces. “His Greek is very good,” she concedes.

“What should I do with it?”

She offers him a withering look. “Give it to the cats to piss on.”

They put the scroll aside and have a drink, and she tells him about her new house in the city. No more is said on the matter. They are as different as night and day, the two of them—which is to say, not very different at all, only a question of one’s vantage point. They are their father’s children, the last of the thunderbolts; they both know he is going to read whatever Publius Scipio has to say to him, just as they both knew they were always going to invade Italy. As the Greeks would put it, one cannot win against Necessity.

 

* * *

 

 _The Ticinus is cold that time of year_ , Scipio writes. _Not as cold as the Trebia, but we shall come to that._

 _I saw him before he was pointed out to me. There was nothing to set him apart from the men on either side of him: he dressed, as he does now, with no more pomp or splendour than the common infantryman, and at the time he still had both his eyes. But as he came riding out of the trees towards the struggling battle-line, I saw at once from his bearing that he was the commander, the architect of this war, the point on which all this madness hinged._

_I knew, too, as if Jupiter King of the Gods had leaned down from his seat on Mount Olympus to speak it in my ear, that the study of him would be the work of my life._

 

* * *

 

“I wish you wouldn’t read that thing,” says Arishat. “It’s over now. There’s no use wallowing.”

The olive trees are in flower this month. They are sitting on the steps of the portico, Arishat whittling at a bit of wood with a hunting knife, Hannibal reading the memoir. He knows it irritates her. She loathes Scipio as the man who took Spain from them, who sacked the city she and her husband built with their own hands. “It’s not wallowing,” says Hannibal. “I just want to understand.”

“You can’t understand war. It’s incomprehensible. That’s the _point_ of it.”

Different as night and day: Hannibal will try to understand anything. So will Scipio. Hence the scrolls that come in month after month, unsigned and unmarked. Hence the hours Hannibal spends reading them in the shade of the budding trees. They are an explanation, an exegesis. Here is the boy who will grow up to bear the name Africanus; here the forge in which he was made, and the blacksmith’s hand that tempered him. Here is what they did to each other. If they could sit and talk it over, they would, but they are enemies, they cannot correspond, _should_ not correspond. All Scipio can do is write his memoirs, as a thousand others have before, and all Hannibal can do is read them, as surely a thousand others will.

“If you could go back to the Ticinus,” says Arishat, “if you could drive a spear into his heart right there and have done with it, would you?”

He looks at her. She is scratching battle diagrams in the dirt with her knife, a game they used to play, fighting and refighting ancient actions to see if they could change the outcome. Salamis, Thermopylae, Gaugamela. Now Hannibal recognises the lagoon at New Carthage, the triple lines of his own doomed infantry at Zama. “Don’t ask me that.”

“That’s the wrong answer,” says Arishat.

She kicks dirt over Scipio’s maniples with a flick of her foot. “I know,” says Hannibal.

 

* * *

 

_I was a young man newly wed the year he marched on Rome._

_The whole city was in a state of utmost terror. Even brave men were heard to mutter that the invader was no mere mortal but a monster, a magician, an underworld spirit who appeared and disappeared and changed his shape at will. I seemed to be the only one to know better, I who had passed within a spear’s throw of him at the Ticinus, so I gathered some friends and took them up to the city wall to see for themselves._

_He was, as I promised, no more monstrous than any of us, and maybe less than some. He ate with his men and fed his elephant a melon and stroked his stallion’s head when it grew restive. Surely, I thought, he has not come to wage war on us for greed or hatred or cruelty, for no man who did so could hope to command the loyalty of so many disparate peoples, for so many years, through so many hardships. He fights for the same reason I do, because his gods have given him no choice. Perhaps he, too, wears his wife’s image graven in a locket; perhaps in his saddlebag is a stone his child once put in his hand. At the time my own first son Publius had just been born, and I was grieving that my father would never hold him._

_“You see,” I said. “He can be beaten. He is a man just like us.”_

_They were unconvinced. “Just like you, maybe,” said my friend Laelius._

 

* * *

 

“I’m going back to Carthage,” says Hannibal. “I have to run for suffete.”

Arishat does not look up from the rabbit she is skinning, but she goes very still, a lion listening in the wind. They have spent a fortnight hunting in the savannah outside Hadrumetum, their longest trip yet. “Do you think,” she says, “there is any conceivable way that could end well?”

“Probably not. But I have to.”

His old contacts have been writing to him from the city, telling him about all the usual problems and a few new ones: the vast compensation they owe the Romans, the greedy despots of the Hundred and Four taxing them dry. “You’re safe here,” says Arishat. “Just stay, read your Homer, eat your olives. For heaven’s sake, why do you always have to take so much on yourself?”

She wipes her flaying knife on the hem of her cloak, her arms red to the elbows. Hannibal does not read her anguish in her voice so much as in the brusqueness of the movement. “The world hasn’t gone away since they burned our ships,” he says. “We’re defeated, not dead.”

“Usually there isn’t much difference.”

They are quiet for a moment. Out here in the scrub there are no wars, no books, no politics, just the heat of their cookfires to warm them and the stars to see by at night. Hannibal knows enough poetry by heart to live like this for a time, if he had to. But back in the villa messages are arriving for him from all over the Mediterranean, and the chapters of Scipio’s memoirs are piling up in the casket, saying _come back, come back, come back._

At last Arishat says, “If you keep your head down, your—friend—in Rome would make sure they let you live out your life in peace.”

“I don’t want him to,” says Hannibal. “Arishat, you know. You took the oath too.”

She does know. In his place she would do the same. Neither of them ever remarried. The harvest is in, crates and crates of olives that taste nothing like the ones from their childhood, and they are touched with the same wild loneliness, living their lives with one foot out the door.

 

* * *

 

_If there is one thing for which I cannot forgive him, it is how he will accept nothing from me._

_I saw him not long after Zama, when he came to hear the terms of my peace. That was the only time I ever hated him. He was wounded, but there was no outward sign of it—I suspect he had taken off his bandages for the occasion—and I could not even ask how he was, for fear of seeming to gloat. I hoped he might beg me for something: refuge, indemnity, I know not what, only that I would have given it. I wanted to be kind to him. I wanted to make a grand gesture. But he had his own doctor, his own medicine; he had no chains for me to strike off. I could do nothing._

_His pride shattered mine. I loathed him for as long as I could, which was not very long at all._

 

* * *

 

The treasury is empty when Hannibal starts his year in office. Twelve months later Carthage is awash in gold, the alarmed Romans are storming up the Byrsa to see what he has got up to this time, and he is fleeing on shipboard like a thief in the night.

All this is inevitable, of course. He never needed Arishat’s warning. But then, there is a smugness in his nature—or so King Antiochus likes to tell him when they quarrel—that sees inevitability everywhere in hindsight, so he will not have to admit to having been taken unawares. Antiochus is, once in a great long while, capable of not being wrong.

Scipio comes to Ephesus, and that is inevitable too.

The manner of their meeting is not. Hannibal is in the massage room above the gymnasium, stripping off to have the aches pounded out of stiff muscles and tired bones. The slave, an older Greek woman, asks him the usual questions about past injuries where she should proceed with care, and he has just told her there are none—expedient if untrue—when the door outside his curtained alcove opens, and another customer comes in. “He’s being facetious,” says a bright, familiar voice. “Let’s see. Spear wound in the left thigh, a fractured right shoulder, two arrow wounds just below the collarbone. And he’d rather die than say if anything hurts.”

“The spear was in my right thigh,” says Hannibal reproachfully.

“Oh,” says Scipio. “Two out of three isn’t bad.”

Lying on his stomach, Hannibal turns just enough to see the top of a fair head pass in front of the curtain and disappear into the next alcove. He knew Scipio was in the city, but he has been trying not to think about it. “You know,” he says, in Latin for privacy, “this is why there are so many rumours about you.”

The hiss of an unpinned cloak, the rustle of falling fabric. He is so close. “You listen,” says Scipio, “to the rumours about me?”

“It’s hard not to. You seem to be everywhere.”

Scipio’s arrival at the massage parlour was so perfectly coincidental it must be anything but. In the absence of a face to look at, it is tempting to imagine a smile. “I’ve spent my life learning you,” says Scipio. “I’m not concerned if anyone knows it.”

Hannibal makes no answer. It could be said that he studiously avoids one. The masseuse digs strong fingers into the painful knots that always form in his shoulders, taking care not to put pressure on the snarls of scar tissue where the arrowheads pierced him years ago. Masinissa had shot him while he was getting away from Zama. In his dreams, though, they are not Numidian arrows but a Roman knife, close-range, personal; and it is not Masinissa’s hand twisting the hilt, but Scipio’s.

“Pity you had to leave your olives,” says Scipio. “I heard they were good.”

“Only as a means of passing the days.”

Peacetime is like walking underwater: one must find a way to breathe, somehow. Scipio understands at once. “It was philosophy for me,” he says. “I’ve been rather taken with Epicurus.”

“And you’re writing your memoirs.”

“They’re finished. You have all the chapters.”

“Do I?” asks Hannibal. Now the masseuse is kneading at the fractured shoulder that healed wrong, and it hurts, it hurts so bad he is grinding his teeth, but Scipio is right: he would rather die than say so. “You only wrote one sentence on the battle.”

“It was boring,” says Scipio. “Just sweating and yelling. You already know how it went.”

A gulf of silence opens up between them, dark and unnavigable. Hannibal considers how best to bridge it. A fiendish move on Scipio’s part, he thinks, staging their first meeting in ten years so it happens with a curtain between them. “Is mine the only copy, then?”

What he means is, _Did you write it just for me,_ and it is what Scipio hears too. He shifts, creaking the pallet beneath him. “I just needed you to know, after all these years.”

The moments slip by. Hannibal says, “I do know.”

The masseuse lifts his arm and holds it behind his back to get at the muscle around the shoulderblade. Here, again, it is not the Greek woman’s hands on him but Scipio’s, holding his wrist, pinning him, and he has to push the thought from his head in a hurry before others like it arrive. “I liked reading it,” he says. “Though I wish it didn’t end so abruptly.”

Scipio laughs. It is a fragile sound, sharp-edged, self-flagellating. “Well,” he says, “not much after Zama was worth writing about.”

 

* * *

 

It is the opposite for Hannibal. Everything before Zama is hazy and tinged with the flavour of myth, like a scene from the Trojan War; while everything after is a grand procession of bright colour and loud noise, excruciating in its slowness, its lapidary clarity.

He did not eat or sleep or stop moving for three days after the battle. Neither did Arishat. They raised new levies from the towns around Hadrumetum, terrified boys armed with their grandfathers’ swords from the first war—few, hopeless, there was no time, they had to get to Carthage before Scipio razed it to the ground. But of course he was planning no such thing, and in a few days the messenger from the Hundred and Four arrived with their orders. Stop, lay down your arms, come home. Surrender.

Arishat struck the man. Hannibal briefly considered mutiny, laughed, and declaimed laments from the Iliad until Arishat struck him too. Then they saddled their horses and did as they were told. It was necessary; it was Necessity.

 _He surprised me again and again,_ goes the last line of Scipio’s memoir, _until the most surprising thing he could do was lose. Then he did that._

 

* * *

 

“I almost wish you would give up,” Scipio says, the day he leaves Ephesus. “But then I wouldn’t admire you half so much as I do.”

They are alone, walking in the garden near the palace gate. No need for a curtain between them now. In a few weeks Scipio will be back in Rome, raising his legions for the new war with Antiochus, and they will be fighting anew. “You’re confident,” says Hannibal.

“I have reason to be.”

He does. Scipio _invictus_. Scipio _magnus_. Hannibal understands this brilliant menace better than anyone alive, but the king does not like him, and will not take his advice. As soon as their fortunes turn sour he will have to go on the run again. It would be easy to grow bitter, it truly would, except he does not have the patience for bitterness.

Scipio kicks a stone out of their path. “You should write your memoirs too.”

“You already know the story,” says Hannibal.

“Not at all. You forget we’ve hardly seen each other face to face.”

Hannibal smiles. Scipio can no longer be called young by any stretch of the imagination, but he still has those pale grey eyes he remembers from the parley at Zama, so lucent and uncanny. They have come full circle since then; they have had a go at olives and Epicurus, and found they needed each other too much to stay at peace. “Someday,” says Hannibal, “we will meet again, and stay up all night telling each other everything.”

“I’d like that,” says Scipio.

They are almost at the gate now, with no one around them for a hundred paces or so. An onlooker at that distance would see them faceless, archetypal: not Scipio of Rome and Hannibal of nowhere in particular, just two men, two walkers in a garden. But they have stopped walking, and they are still alone.

In careful, precise Phoenician, Scipio says, “Keep well till then, old friend.”

Hannibal thinks in Greek, now. He reads Aramaic, speaks Latin too often, swears in half a dozen Iberian and Gallic dialects. He cannot remember when anyone last addressed him in the tongue of his fatherland. He did not think to hear it here, a world away from home, and certainly not in the voice that once said to him, _Prepare for war, for you have found peace intolerable._

His face must have betrayed something. Scipio takes a sudden step towards him and reaches for his shoulder, the arrowhead shoulder. “Are you—should I not have?”

The concern is genuine. Pale eyes, parley-in-the-desert eyes, Zama eyes. Hannibal says the only thing he can think to say, in the only language he can bear to say it in. “Thank you.”

 

* * *

 

They kiss at the gate. Inevitability again, Ananke mother of fates wielding her spindle.

 

* * *

 

Scipio must have changed his mind about the ending of his memoir, because a new scroll arrives for Hannibal in Bithynia.

There is a prophecy that goes, _Libyssan earth shall cover the corpse of Hannibal._ It came from the oracle at Siwa, and at first he held to it as a promise that he would go home someday and die in his native Libya. Then Scipio defeats Antiochus, and Hannibal flees Ephesus; he goes to Crete, and the Romans find him there too; he returns to Asia Minor, visits Armenia, and eventually fetches up in Bithynia. The house King Prusias gives him is in a sleepy seaside village by name of Libyssa.

He laughs and laughs when they tell him the name, and they do not understand why. All right. It shall be here, then. At least Arishat is safe—she fled south with the caravans when the Romans came for her, and Hannibal has heard nothing from her since. She is a very old woman now, if she still lives. He wants to think he would feel it if she died, that he would know if he were the last one left, but he is a rational man. He knows better.

And so he is alone. Or he was, until Scipio’s words found him again.

 _He seemed happy when I saw him in Ephesus,_ the scroll says. _I hoped he was. For by now I too have tasted exile, and it is necessary for me to believe that an exile can be happy in whatever place he finds himself. I have done none of the wrong of which I have been accused, unless it is being too gentle with my enemy. My conscience is clear. I have my books, my sweet daughter Cornelia to keep me company; I know that somewhere far away lives the twin of my soul who understands my grief, for it is his grief too. For now that must be enough._

There is no mention of the war with Antiochus, or the role either of them played in it. Only—as Scipio would say—the parts that weren’t boring, the parts that mattered.

 

* * *

 

The Bithynians watch Hannibal carefully, the winter they tell him Scipio is dead.

They have nothing to fear. He is not about to seize Prusias’ joke of a fleet and launch a new invasion of Italy, even though there is no one alive who could stop him now. It seems to Hannibal that he has done nothing all his life but invade Italy, and he is sick to the stomach of it. He never wants to hear the name of Rome again. He wants to see his sister. He wants to breathe deep the musty air of the library at Carthage; to walk in the heat of the sun on his father’s lands, and taste an olive he picked with his own hand. He wants Scipio.

But he is a rational man, he is a veteran of loss. He neither hopes nor mourns. He audits the palace accounts, and draws up plans for a new shipyard. He translates some Simonides. He lectures Prusias, using words of few syllables and many diagrams, on the proper way to carry out a flanking manoeuvre. That evening the king is more attentive than usual, suspiciously so, as though he has done something stupid and wants to make up for it before he is discovered. Hannibal will have to find out what. He has become a modern-day Sisyphus, he thinks: either he is invading Italy, or he is nursemaiding foolish kings.

When he rides past the harbour on his way back to the house in Libyssa, there is a low-slung trireme coming in on the tide.

The slave who watches the door comes in late that night. Hannibal is not asleep; he seldom sleeps now, but sits up listening to the waves breathe against the shore, the nameless birds call in the dishevelled garden. “Lord,” the girl says, “there is a man at the gate wanting you.”

Hannibal looks up. It is a dangerous occupation, reading Euripides by lamplight on a night like this. He has been staring at _Hekuba_ for three hours and they have not even slit Polyxena’s throat yet. “What man?”

“I know not, sir, he would not give his name.”

Midnight has rung its bells and departed. The caller is either a very rude guest-friend or a very polite assassin; impossible to tell which without some sign from the gods. Maybe Hannibal does have some premonition, or maybe he does not want it to be said that the great _strategos_ who pitched his camp before the gates of Rome thirty years ago now trembles to open his own door at night. “Send him in.”

The slave hesitates—smart girl, the Romans would not spare her either—and goes.

He toys with his ring while he waits. Arishat’s ring, a black onyx with an intaglio etching of a lion’s head, hollow and brimming with hemlock—her last gift to him before they went their separate ways. There are good deaths and bad deaths, she’d said. They know what good deaths are. They have studied the examples: their father riding into a river to save his sons, their brother’s final _aristeia_ on the Metaurus. Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles. It will be here then, it will be tonight.

Then the door opens, and a dead man walks in.

There are good deaths and bad deaths and deaths that are no death at all. Under the hood of his rough woollen mantle Scipio’s eyes are as bright and searching as before. He goes straight to Hannibal’s couch and takes both his hands and says, “We must go. They’re coming on the next ship. I only just beat them here.”

Hannibal inhales, and exhales. He says, “ _Scipio_.”

“They’re coming for you,” says Scipio more insistently, as if he thinks Hannibal has no idea what he means, has not followed the progress of the Roman commissioners from Italy to Asia Minor with a hawk’s eye and a curious mix of dread and anticipation. “The Senate’s been in contact with Prusias. I intercepted one of their messages. He’s agreed to hand you over.”

That explains the guilty solicitude, then. Not that it matters. At present they could be marching an entire legion against Hannibal’s little seaside house and he would manage, at best, a tickle of annoyance. “Is that why you,” he says, “died?”

Scipio hesitates. His fingers are chapped and chilly with the night, and his cheeks are sunken. He _has_ been ill. “Did you grieve?”

It is like being on the massage table again and holding still, unbreathing, refusing to flinch. Questions surface, messy and enjambed: what about sweet daughter Cornelia, what does she know, will she write a memoir someday about how her father never got to hold her sons. “Not yet,” he says. “News like this is often false.”

“But you would have? If it were true?”

“I suppose you’ll never find out,” says Hannibal, “since you interrupted me before I got to that point.”

Scipio tosses back his hair, impatient. “Don’t be difficult. I had to disappear quickly. There wasn’t anyone I trusted to take a message in time. Anyway—”

His face takes on a hard, stony cast. It does not suit him. “This way they can’t make me attend my trial.”

The language of exiles: the secret plans, the false accusations, the constant running before the wind. _Twin of my soul._ Scipio speaks it, too. “You have a refuge somewhere?” asks Hannibal.

“No,” says Scipio. “But I have a fast ship and a good map.”

His features soften, and are his again. They are locked together, hand upon hand. “Hannibal,” he says. After all these years of bastardised Greek it is rain in the desert to hear the name pronounced as it was meant to be spoken, a blessing of Ba’al, an invocation of grace. “Disappear with me.”

 

* * *

 

Dying is much like any other tactical movement. There are finnicky steps involved, and each must be stage-managed with a master’s hand.

Hannibal says the words of manumission over each of the household slaves and lets them carry off the silverware on their way out. It is all Prusias’ anyway. He empties Arishat’s ring over the fire and drops it in the scraggly garden grass—Libyssan earth, he thinks, and grins—with just a trace of liquid left in it. Someone will determine it was hemlock, a fatal dose. Someone else will trip over _Hekuba_ lying forgotten at the foot of the couch, and that is how they will know for sure, for Hannibal never treats his scrolls with anything less than extravagant care. The body must be at the bottom of the sea, or taken off by the slaves to be buried somewhere. Prusias will shrug his helpless will-of-the-gods shrug, and after banging their heads for some time against the royal indifference, the Romans will give up and take themselves back home.

A good death, indeed.

“You still have all these?” asks Scipio, peering through the doorway from the next room. He is holding the ebony casket with the memoirs in it, and there is a hushed note in his voice. “I thought you must have left them behind by now.”

For a man of his genius, he can sometimes be obtuse. “I have the only copy,” says Hannibal patiently. “We’d better take it with us.”

They look at each other across the room. And it is such a bland room, Hannibal realises, now he comes to appraise it with a visitor’s eye—barely furnished, comfortless as a Spartan dorm, only the scrolls and papers on the desk showing any sign of its inhabitant’s spirit. He never did care much for personal treasures. It strikes him, then, what Scipio is going to do—a flash of startling telepathy that would have saved him at Zama, if only he had understood it at the time. “What for?” says Scipio. “We don’t need it.”

He goes to the hearth and tips all the scrolls into the fire. They fill the casket with gold and silver and a few volumes of Sappho instead, and just like that, they are ready to leave.

Hannibal takes a last look round the place of his death, dark and silent now. Perhaps in Rome the Senate will decree a week of thanksgiving. Perhaps far in the depths of Africa, where the Nile finds its source in the Mountains of the Moon and the caravans cross the vast highways with their cargo of gold, Arishat will hear that her last brother is dead; but she will not tear her clothes or beat her breast or pray the rumour is false, for she is a rational woman, too.

Scipio touches his arm, bringing him back to himself. “Let’s go somewhere with plenty of sun.”

“A flawless strategy,” says Hannibal.

They shoulder their burdens and unlatch the door, and step out together into the winter night.

**Author's Note:**

>  _"Hannibal son of Hamilcar left the world as quietly as if he had walked out of the hidden gate in his garden. [...] He left no explanation behind him."_  
>  \- Harold Lamb
> 
> Hannibal and Scipio both died in exile in 183 BCE, within months of each other. We don't know anything about Hannibal's sisters except for who they (possibly) married, not even their names, so Arishat is almost entirely an OC.
> 
> [enemyofrome on tumblr](http://enemyofrome.tumblr.com/post/170595317873/dirtybinary-out-here-in-the-scrub-there-are-no)—follow for more classics nonsense or check out my original novel [here](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32322796-elegy)


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